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I traced missile casings in Syria back to their original sellers, so it’s time for the West to reveal who they sell arms to

I
don’t think either NATO or the EU has the slightest interest in
chasing the provenance of weapons in the hands of Islamist fighters
in Syria or anywhere else in the Middle East

by
Robert Fisk

Readers,
a small detective story. Note down this number: MFG BGM-71E-1B. And
this number: STOCK NO 1410-01-300-0254. And this code: DAA A01
C-0292. I found all these numerals printed on the side of a spent
missile casing lying in the basement of a bombed-out Islamist base in
eastern Aleppo last year. At the top were the words “Hughes
Aircraft Co”, founded in California back in the 1930s by the
infamous Howard Hughes and sold in 1997 to Raytheon, the massive US
defence contractor whose profits last year came to $23.35bn (£18bn).
Shareholders include the Bank of America and Deutsche Bank.
Raytheon’s Middle East offices can be found in Saudi Arabia, the
United Arab Emirates, Israel, Egypt, Turkey and Kuwait.

There
were dozens of other used-up identical missile casings in the same
underground room in the ruins of eastern Aleppo, with sequential
codings; in other words, these anti-armour missiles – known in the
trade as Tows, “Tube-launched, optically tracked and wire-guided
missiles” – were not individual items smuggled into Syria through
the old and much reported CIA smugglers’ trail from Libya. These
were shipments, whole batches of weapons that left their point of
origin on military aircraft pallets.

Some
time ago, in the United States, I met an old Hughes Aircraft
executive who laughed when I told him my story of finding his
missiles in eastern Aleppo. When the company was sold, Hughes had
been split up into eight components, he said. But assuredly, this
batch of rockets had left from a US government base. Amateur sleuths
may have already tracked down the first set of numbers above. The
“01” in the stock number is a Nato coding for the US, and the
BGM-71E is a Raytheon Systems Company product. There are videos of
Islamist fighters using the BGM-71E-1B variety in Idlib province two
years before I found the casings of other anti-tank missiles in
neighbouring Aleppo. As for the code: DAA A01 C-0292, I am still
trying to trace this number.

Even if
I can find it, however, I can promise readers one certain conclusion.
This missile will have been manufactured and sold by Hughes/Raytheon
absolutely legally to a Nato, pro-Nato or “friendly” (i.e.
pro-American) power (government, defence ministry, you name it), and
there will exist for it an End User Certificate (EUC), a document of
impeccable provenance which will be signed by the buyers – in this
case by the chaps who purchased the Tow missiles in very large
numbers – stating that they are the final recipients of the
weapons.

There is
no guarantee this promise will be kept, but – as the arms
manufacturers I’ve been talking to in the Balkans over the past
weeks yet again confirm – there is neither an obligation nor an
investigative mechanism on the part of the arms manufacturers to
ensure that their infinitely expensive products are not handed over
by “the buyers” to Isis, al-Nusra/al-Qaeda – which was clearly
the case in Aleppo – or some other anti-Assad Islamist group in
Syria branded by the US State Department itself as a “terrorist
organisation”.

Of
course, the weapons might have been sent (illegally under the terms
of the unenforceable EUC) to a nice, cuddly, “moderate” militia
like the now largely non-existent “Free Syrian Army”, many of
whose weapons – generously donated by the west – have fallen into
the hands of the “Bad Guys”; i.e. the folk who want to overthrow
the Syrian regime (which would please the west) but who would like to
set up an Islamist cult-dictatorship in its place (which would not
please the west).

Thus
al-Nusra can be the recipients of missiles from our “friends” in
the region – here, please forget the EUCs – or from those
mythical “moderates” who in turn hand them over to Isis/al-Nusra,
etc, for cash, favours, fear or fratricidal war and surrender.

It is a
fact, I’m sorry to recall, that of all the weapons I saw used in
the 15-year Lebanese civil war (1975-1990), not one was in the hands
of those to whom those same weapons were originally sold. Russian and
Bulgarian Kalashnikovs sold to Syria were used by Palestinian
guerrillas, old American tanks employed by the Lebanese Christian
Phalange/Lebanese forces were gifts from the Israelis who received
them from the US.

These
outrageous weapons shipments were constantly recorded at the time –
but in such a way that you might imagine that the transfers were
enshrined in law (“American-made, Israeli-supplied” used to be
the mantra). The Phalange, in fact, also collected bunches of
British, Soviet, French and Yugoslav armour – the Zastava arms
factory in the Serbian city of Kragujevac, which I have just visited,
featured among the latter – for their battles.

In
eastern Aleppo, who knows what “gifts” to the city’s surviving
citizens in the last months of the war acquired a new purpose?
Smashed Mitsubishi pick-up trucks, some in camouflage paint, others
in neutral colours, were lying in the streets I walked through. Were
they stolen by al-Nusra? Or simply used by NGOs? Did they arrive,
innocently enough, in the lot whose documents, also found in Aleppo,
registered “Five Mitsubishi L200 Pick Up” sent by “Shipper:
Conflict, Humanitarian and Security Department (Chase), Whitehall
SW1A SEG London”?

Of
course they did – alongside the Glasgow ambulance I found next to a
gas canister bomb dump on the Aleppo front line at Beni Zeid in 2016,
whose computer codings I reported in The Independent at great length
– five codings in all – and to which the Scottish Ambulance
Authority responded by saying they could not trace the ambulance
because they needed more details.

But back
to guns and artillery. Why don’t Nato track all these weapons as
they leave Europe and America? Why don’t they expose the real
end-users of these deadly shipments? The arms manufacturers I spoke
to in the Balkans attested that Nato and the US are fully aware of
the buyers of all their machine guns and mortars. Why can’t the
details of those glorious end user certificates be made public – as
open and free for us to view as are the frightful weapons which the
manufacturers are happy to boast in their catalogues.

It was
instructive that when The Independent asked the Saudis last
week to respond to Bosnian weapons shipment documents I found in
eastern Aleppo last year (for 120mm mortars) – which the factory’s
own weapons controller recalled were sent from Novi Travnik to Saudi
Arabia – they replied that they (the Saudis) did not provide
support of any kind “to any terrorist organisation”, that
al-Nusra and Isis were designated “terrorist organisations” by
Saudi Royal Decree and that the “allegations” (sic) were “vague
and unfounded”.

But what
did this mean? Government statements in response to detailed reports
of arms shipments should not be the last word – and there is an
important question that remained unanswered in the Saudi statement.
The Saudis themselves had asked for copies of the shipment documents
– yet they did not specifically say whether they did or did not
receive this shipment of mortars, nor comment upon the actual papers
which The Independent sent them.

These
papers were not “vague” – nor was the memory of the Bosnian
arms controller who said they went with the mortars to Saudi Arabia
and whose shipment papers I found in Syria. Indeed, Ifet Krnjic, the
man whose signature I found in eastern Aleppo, has as much right to
have his word respected as that of the Saudi authorities. So what did
Saudi Arabia’s military personnel – who were surely shown the
documents – make of them? What does “unfounded” mean? Were the
Saudis claiming by the use of this word that the documents were
forgeries?

These
are questions, of course, which should be taken up by the
international authorities in the Balkans. Nato’s and the EU’s
writ still runs in the wreckage of Bosnia and both have copies of the
documents I found in Aleppo. Are they making enquiries about this
shipment, which Krnjic said went to Saudi Arabia, and the shipping
documents which clearly ended up in the hands of al-Nusra – papers
of which Nato and the EU had knowledge when the transfer was
originally made?

I bet
they’re not. For I don’t think either Nato or the EU has the
slightest interest in chasing the provenance of weapons in the hands
of Islamist fighters in Syria or anywhere else in the Middle East –
certainly not in the case of Damascus, where the west has just given
up its attempt to unseat Assad.

Indeed,
in a political landscape where “regime change” has become a
moral, ethical objective, there can be no moral, ethical
investigation of just how the merchants of death (the makers) manage
to supply the purveyors of death (the killers) with their guns and
mortars and artillery. And if any end user says that “allegations”
of third parties are “vague and unfounded” – always supposing
that the persons saying this are themselves “end users” – this,
I promise you, must be accepted as true and unanswerable and as solid
as the steel of which mortars are made.

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